The End of Reconstruction

As time passed, it became more and more obvious that the
problems of the South were not being solved by harsh laws
and continuing rancor against former Confederates.
Moreover, some Southern Radical state governments with
prominent African-American officials appeared corrupt and
inefficient. The nation was quickly tiring of the attempt
to impose racial democracy and liberal values on the South
with Union bayonets. In May 1872, Congress passed a general
Amnesty Act, restoring full political rights to all but
about 500 former rebels.

Gradually Southern states began electing members of the
Democratic Party into office, ousting carpetbagger
governments and intimidating African Americans from voting
or attempting to hold public office. By 1876 the
Republicans remained in power in only three Southern
states. As part of the bargaining that resolved the
disputed presidential elections that year in favor of
Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republicans promised to withdraw
federal troops that had propped up the remaining Republican
governments. In 1877 Hayes kept his promise, tacitly
abandoning federal responsibility for enforcing blacks'
civil rights.

The South was still a region devastated by war, burdened by
debt caused by misgovernment, and demoralized by a decade
of racial warfare. Unfortunately, the pendulum of national
racial policy swung from one extreme to the other. A
federal government that had supported harsh penalties
against Southern white leaders now tolerated new and
humiliating kinds of discrimination against African
Americans. The last quarter of the 19th century saw a
profusion of "Jim Crow" laws in Southern states that
segregated public schools, forbade or limited
African-American access to many public facilities such as
parks, restaurants, and hotels, and denied most blacks the
right to vote by imposing poll taxes and arbitrary literacy
tests. "Jim Crow" is a term derived from a song in an 1828
minstrel show where a white man first performed in
"blackface."

Historians have tended to judge Reconstruction harshly, as
a murky period of political conflict, corruption, and
regression that failed to achieve its original high-minded
goals and collapsed into a sinkhole of virulent racism.
Slaves were granted freedom, but the North completely
failed to address their economic needs. The Freedmen's
Bureau was unable to provide former slaves with political
and economic opportunity. Union military occupiers often
could not even protect them from violence and intimidation.
Indeed, federal army officers and agents of the Freedmen's
Bureau were often racists themselves. Without economic
resources of their own, many Southern African Americans
were forced to become tenant farmers on land owned by their
former masters, caught in a cycle of poverty that would
continue well into the 20th century.

Reconstruction-era governments did make genuine gains in
rebuilding Southern states devastated by the war, and in
expanding public services, notably in establishing
tax-supported, free public schools for African Americans
and whites. However, recalcitrant Southerners seized upon
instances of corruption (hardly unique to the South in this
era) and exploited them to bring down radical regimes. The
failure of Reconstruction meant that the struggle of
African Americans for equality and freedom was deferred
until the 20th century -- when it would become a national,
not just a Southern issue.